Frame by Frame

Posts Tagged ‘Eastman Kodak’

Still, I was surprised by this news item; Kodak is re-introducing a Super8mm camera that shoots actual film, which at this point is being marketed at much too high a price point for the average consumer, but is rather aimed at those who want to use film as a medium for artistic expression.

The last Super 8mm camera I owned, many years ago, was a Kodak Super 8mm sound camera, which used 50 ft. cartridges of film with a magnetic sound strip on the side – it worked well enough, particularly when one used high speed Ektachrome film, but it was almost instantly superseded by the advent of video cameras – and that, for the moment, was the end of that.

However, as Don Clark notes in The Wall Street Journal, “Eastman Kodak Co., the photography pioneer that was disrupted by the digital revolution, is placing a new bet on a gadget from a simpler time. The company is using the Consumer Electronics Show to lay out plans for a film camera based on the Super 8 design launched 50 years ago. Kodak stopped producing Super 8 units in 1982, after video cameras savaged the market for home movies made with film.

Jeff Clarke, Kodak’s chief executive, isn’t ignoring the changes in the market now that billions of consumers own mobile phones with digital cameras. But he believes professional filmmakers and serious amateurs will appreciate the subtle qualities of an analog medium that many Hollywood veterans used to learn their trade.

Mr. Clarke cites the preference among many Hollywood directors to shoot on 35-millimeter or 70-millimeter film. He also sees a parallel in the way some audiophiles prefer the analog medium of vinyl records.

Kodak plans to play on some of the conveniences of digital technology. Just as movies shot on film are usually converted to digital files for editing and projection, buyers of the new camera that turn to Kodak for processing will get a digital copy of their imagery as well as eight-millimeter film to use in projectors.

The new camera will feature a digital viewfinder, he said. ‘This is no longer the classic script of a war of digital versus analog,’ Mr. Clarke said. ‘What it really is now is the complementary characteristics of both.’ . . .

The first Super 8 camera was launched at the 1964 New York World’s Fair and went on sale the next year. It featured a pistol-style grip and packed eight millimeter film in a cartridge, an advance that avoided the need to thread film through the camera in the dark.

Kodak’s effort to revive Super 8 is aimed in large part at film schools, where many students no longer get a chance to experiment with analog footage, Mr. Clarke said. He also expects some people making commercial or experimental films–who have sometimes used eight- or 16-millimeter footage–to try the new product.

Mr. Clarke said Kodak has received expressions of support for the new camera by many Hollywood directors, including Steven Spielberg and Star Wars director J.J. Abrams, who directed a 2011 film called Super 8 and was famously hired by Mr. Spielberg as a 14-year-old to work on the older director’s Super 8 film archive.”

I would also venture to say that a lot of old Super 8mm cameras will now be brought back to life, assuming that Kodak makes enough raw stock. And as one commenter on the article noted, “Dwayne’s in Parsons, KS (notable as the final Kodachrome shop) will process a 50ft super-8 cartridge for $12. Just saying.” Hmmmm . . .

With thousands of hits every day, we hope to keep posting new material on films and people in films that matter, as well as on related issues, commercial free, with truly open access, for the entire film community. So look back and see what we’ve been up to, and page through the past to the present.

There are also more than 70 videos on film history, theory and criticism to check out on the Frame by Frame video blog, arranged in carousel fashion to automatically play one after the other, on everything from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to film aspect ratios, to discussions of pan and scan, Criterion video discs, and a whole lot more.

So go back and see what you’ve been missing – you can always use the search box in the upper right hand corner to see if your favorite film or director is listed, but if not, drop me a line and we’ll see if we can’t do something about it. We’ve just updated our storage space on the blog, so there will be plenty more to come, so check it out – see you at the movies!

Writes Hart, “Even after Richard Linklater shot his DGA Award-nominated movie, Boyhood, on film, the Austin-based director had no qualms about switching to digital video for his upcoming ’80s-era comedy, Everybody Wants Some. ‘I’m not an absolutist so I’ve never really bought into digital versus film,’ Linklater says.

‘Film history is full of these little bursts of, “Oh there’s a huge paradigm shift!” and then it kind of recedes back to what filmmaking is at its core—storytelling. And behind that storytelling is a director and a creative team making aesthetic choices: What should the movie look like? What should it feel like? To me, that’s the director’s job.’

And those aesthetic choices continue to include the option to shoot on film thanks in part to Christopher Nolan’s advocacy. The British-born filmmaker, who’s shot all of his movies on film stock, has no interest in imposing personal taste on other artists. Instead, he wants to fortify the integrity of the director’s voice. ‘I’m not anti-digital in any way, but I’m absolutely committed to getting this choice back into the hands of the director. I don’t want anyone telling any filmmaker they can’t shoot on film any more than I want anyone telling David Fincher or Steven Soderbergh that they can’t shoot digital. It’s the director’s right. It’s their choice.’

Nolan became alarmed about the future of film last summer when Eastman Kodak Company, the only remaining manufacturer of 35 millimeter stock, threatened to shutter its photochemical film business. Kodak CEO Jeff Clarke explains the company’s dilemma: ‘We used to make prints for tens of thousands of theaters but over the past eight years, we went down 96 percent, from roughly 25 billion linear feet of film a year to half a billion.”

Faced with the prospect of stopping film production at the company’s upstate New York factory, Clarke decided to visit Los Angeles and meet with his customers so he could gauge Hollywood’s interest in the future of celluloid. As he visited studio executives, Clarke also sat down with Nolan.

‘The heads of postproduction and production at the studios had all basically told Jeff to buzz off: film’s dead, digital’s everything,’ Nolan recalls. ‘I turned around and said, “You need to be talking to a higher level because nobody running a Hollywood movie studio is going to want to oversee the death of a technology which not only is a prized part of our history; it’s also something we absolutely need for the future.”

Though he was deep into postproduction on Interstellar, Nolan got on the phone with filmmakers including Steven Spielberg, J.J. Abrams, Bennett Miller, and Judd Apatow. They, in turn, called the studios and lobbied for a continued commitment to the medium of film. Clarke recalls, ‘Within 48 hours of having lunch with Christopher Nolan, I’d gotten calls from five of the six major studios and a dozen of the most important filmmakers. At that point we were able to build a coalition.’

Martin Scorsese was another director who supported the Keep-Kodak-Open campaign. ‘Filmmakers should have the choice of whether they want to shoot on film, it’s important to have the option,’ he says. ‘Film has a history, and that history doesn’t begin with digital formats, it begins with film. … And that’s part of the art form—the light meets the emulsion and extraordinary things happen. So yes, I believe it is essential to preserve that choice.’ As a result of the high-powered lobbying, all the major studios agreed in February to buy contractually specified quantities of film stock from Kodak over the next several years.

The Kodak deal assures the continued production of movies using film on the scale of such upcoming shot-on-film releases like J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens, Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, Sam Mendes’ latest installment of the Bond franchise, Spectre, David O. Russell’s Joy and Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. The Directors Guild supported the agreement. ‘While most appreciate the opportunities that digital provides, directors and fans alike share a love for the beauty and history of film,’ DGA President Paris Barclay said at the time. ‘We’re incredibly pleased that film will remain a viable option for filmmakers for the foreseeable future.’”

About the Author

Wheeler Winston Dixon, Ryan Professor of Film Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is an internationally recognized scholar and writer of film history, theory and criticism. He is the author of thirty books and more than 100 articles on film, and appears regularly in national media outlets discussing film and culture trends. Frame by Frame is a collection of his thoughts on a number of those topics. All comments by Dixon on this blog are his own opinions.

In The National News

Wheeler Winston Dixon has been quoted by Fast Company, The New Yorker, The New York Times, the BBC, CNN, The Christian Science Monitor, US News and World Report, The Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, The PBS Newshour, USA Today and other national media outlets on digital cinema, film and related topics - see the UNL newsroom at http://news.unl.edu/news-releases/1/ for more details.

UNL Film Studies Professor Wheeler Winston Dixon discusses the 2015 Ridley Scott film "The Martian," and the accuracy (and often inaccuracy) of science-fiction films at predicting real advancements in science and technology. […]